The 22nd annual Tokyo Summer Festival is set to begin July 5. This five-week long international festival attracts outstanding artists from around the world. Organized by the Arion-Edo Foundation in cooperation with the Asahi Shimbun, it presents a different theme every year, and has been distinguished for being planned and presented entirely by professional musicians since it was launched in 1985.

 This year's festival will present 12 programs in 19 concerts, on the theme "Songs of the Earth / Music in the Streets," featuring the first appearance in Japan of the French breakdance group Black Blanc Beur, the internationally celebrated Senegalese pop singer Youssou N'Dour, and the iconoclastic violinist Gilles Apap performing Vivaldi's "Four Seasons."

Aim of the Festival
 The classical music that we listen to nowadays has once been fostered in Europe's churches and saloons of the past's royalties and aristocrats. Even for the later generations this music stayed reserved to the privileged few of these societies.
In spite of such an era, there have always been the minstrels and troubadours who made music in the streets and on the squares. By singing about the joys and sorrows of life, the common people easily identified with these musicians.
The songs and dances of the people were rooted in the creation itself and, in a way uniquely their own, transmit the dynamic of 'Mother Earth' and a sort of joie de vivre to our modern society.
During this year's Tokyo Summer Festival we hope that you will take the opportunity to get in touch with the dynamic music and dance born out of the very earth and cultivated in the streets and squares and take the time to come away from the mechanical and artificial sounds that fill our daily lives.

(from the Website of the Arion-Edo Foundation)

For details on concerts and information on the festival, please visit the Arion-Edo
Foundation Website
http://www.arion-edo.org/home/index.jsp (in English and Japanese)